Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter snubbed the salmon on the menu at a recent magazine awards function at the Waldorf-Astoria, preferring to make up his own order of cheese sandwiches. (Alas, so the story went, the waiter wasn’t allowed in with his tray).

And a recent Page Six item put supermodel Cindy Crawford at the new Mediterranean restaurant Alaia dining on a beef carpaccio appetizer – without the beef. Imagine! You didn’t need to read this, however, to know what all true New Yorkers must observe every time they dine out: our city has the fussiest eaters in the world.

Matt Scully, Alaia’s chef, insists that a meat-based dish sans meat is not among the most memorable menu demands his kitchen has been asked to concoct.

One of the freakiest appeals, he says, came to his old restaurant, Scully on Spring. ‘The guy was very distinguished, well-dressed and well-spoken – and he was a regular,” Scully remembers. ‘But then one day he came in and ordered a raw hamburger.” Scully said the gentleman sent his order back four times. ‘We think he wanted it tartar, though he wanted it on a bun.” To add insult to injury, the mooing meat patty ultimately went untouched.

Other orders may seem just as odd – but are actually made out of practicality. Scully explains that when Alaia first opened, Stephen Baldwin, a partner at the restaurant, was entertaining multiple parties each night. ‘So,” Scully says, ‘he’d come in at six and order half a steak. And then at 8:30 or nine, he’d ask for the other half.”

Some pretty wacky requests hit the kitchen of Steve Fillis, the chef de cuisine at the newish SoHo restaurant Mercer Kitchen. There, Fillis reports, it’s not uncommon for diners to ask him to ‘hold the chicken” – even on dishes where the only other ingredients are potatoes and beans.

Even in the eatery’s signature dish, a tuna carpaccio and wasabi pizza, Fillis often encounters patrons who want their tuna well-done. Similarly, culinary barriers are blurred by patrons who, not understanding that the menu’s egg-based frittata must be fried in order to keep its omelette-esque consistency, will ask for it grilled.

(There’s also a Mercer Kitchen contingent who like to go against every meal manner their mothers taught them and eat their dessert before their main course.)

Ephraim Kadish, chef at Asia de Cuba, found himself cutting a finished dish into ‘individual, bite-sized pieces.” Another asked him to take one dish and serve its multiple ingredients separately. ‘We made it into about 30 different dishes,” he remember. ‘The kitchen garnished each one.”

While Kadish says that celebrities are maybe his least picky eaters – ‘They eat out enough to where they learn to trust the chef,” he reasons – Anthony Walton, chef and part-owner of the super-hip nightspot-cum-restaurant Veruka, thinks differently.

Walton says his menu is deliberately light – but, he says the kitchen gets requests from celebs who want dishes to be lighter still. For instance, Goldie Hawn recently ordered her tuna extra-rare and on a bald plate – without side dishes or garnish.

‘As a chef it doesn’t bother me,” Walton says of pickiness. ‘There might be a medical reason [they’re ordering food a certain way].” The bottom line, Walton reasons, is that ‘the customer is paying for the meal, so let them have it the way they like it.”